Мастер и Маргарита

Выпуск фильма Майкла Локшина

5 июня 2025 г.

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June 5, 2025

In May 2025, Michael Lockshin’s film The Master and Margarita was released in Germany and Austria, and this month Italy is expected to follow on June 19, 2025. On his Facebook profile, Lockshin wrote that «the English-language releases await the court’s ruling to place Bulgakov’s novel in the public domain. So random people can’t stop it. Hopefully, later this year».

The people he is referring to are not that «random», though. It concerns the Russian film producer Svetlana Migunova-Dali and the American film producer Grace Loh who announced in 2017 that they had acquired the rights to an English-language film adaptation of The Master and Margarita. Two years later, they announced that they had an agreement with the renowned director Baz Luhrmann to make it happen.

Click here to read more on the project of Migunova-Dali and Loh

Now that the distribution company Luminosity Pictures wants to release Michael Lockshin’s film in the United States, but Migunova-Dali and Loh want to prevent that because they believe they own the rights

On February 11, 2025, Luminosity Pictures filed a lawsuit against both Migunova-Dali and Loh at the California Central District Court to lift their block

The impact of the court's ruling will be broader than the interests of the distributor. Luminosity Pictures argues that the novel The Master and Margarita is in the public domain, and that therefore no one can claim rights to it. If the court follows this reasoning, anyone who wants to make an adaptation of the novel in the future - film, theatre, opera or whatever - would be freed for good from the suffocating claims of Sergei Shilovsky, Bulgakov's self-proclaimed «grandson».

Click here to read more on Sergei Shilovsky